Imagine it is 500 years in the future and there is a student whatever-the-equivalent of ‘reading’ whatever-is-the-equivalent of a ‘book’ of history*Given that ‘history is written by the victors’ and the narrative recorded in the ‘book’ will thus depend on the path society has taken, we are necessarily predicting the future when we seek to answer the question. But absurd idealizations of objectivity aside, how might the present moment be viewed? about our present. What will be considered the grand challenge of our time*One boundary condition is necessarily that there is someone to ask the question, thus some degree of ‘victory condition’ must have been met (from an existential perspective). So in answering the question, perhaps it is impossible to avoid the bias of our own perspective on what must be true if we are indeed going to survive.?
The contenders:*Please note that this is not remotely intended to be a complete list of the challenges our society and species faces today. Issues of racism, sexism, poverty, hunger, disease, etc. are not addressed herein. I do not wish to distract or detract from the necessary work on the deepest social issues of our time. This is just one nerd’s lens.
An obvious front runner, and a personal focus of mine.*ultimately, I work on climate because I want to feel agency in an arena satisfying my particular proclivities and in a way that aligns with the narrative I want to be able to tell about my life
Requiring simultaneous globally-aligned action on the axes of technology, finance, policy, and culture certainly seems tough enough to make climate change a prime contender for the title of ‘grand challenge.’
But why do we suffer from the potential ravishes of climate change in the first place? It surely isn’t something we chose (in the sense that we wouldn’t have wished for a negative externality associated with industrialization). It’s a consequence of the emergent propensity of human civilization to demand evermore energy and things, while simultaneously exerting dominion over the biosphere, coming up against the finitude of an ecosystem.
Is there anything objectively wrong with using a resource to benefit the quality of life of a population? I won’t deign to guess at your moral framework, but it probably isn’t too much of a stretch to assert that some combination of intention and consequence comprise the moral calculus of our actions. If our intentions were not morally bankrupt, then it is in the consequences of them that we find ourselves at ethical risk.*Don’t worry too much about this though – the concept of ethics on this planet probably dies with us too And, indeed, we find ourselves presently unable (or unwilling) to change course, of taking appropriate action, despite a preponderance of evidence that we must. This does not make our historical choices to serve human progress unethical (or unsound), but our present knowledge of the potential travesty-in-waiting of our own making means that we can no longer claim ignorance to the choice that we are making.
Climate is not the only consequence of human action that bears moral and existential risk. And it’s not the only travesty that we fail to address despite our culpability. However, it is indeed the most threatening and most global bellwether of our condition. As such, perhaps climate change is not the grand challenge of our time, but indeed a symptom of some deeper crucible our species must face.
So, if climate change is the symptom, not the source, of our grand challenge, what candidates beyond climate do we have for our student of the future?
Finite Resources
Perhaps our more fundamental challenge is that we live on a planet that is finite, with a flux of energy that is finite, and as a consequence there may be an ultimate carrying capacity. The techno-optimist may point out that 1) technology can solve for much in the way of carrying capacity, and already has (e.g. Haber-Bosch), 2) we technically aren’t confined to this planet, and 3) it would take a bold mind indeed to extrapolate to human species growth potential beyond the finitude of the universe. As such, carrying capacity is a red herring. ‘Grant me sufficient energy and I will shape the very fabric of our reality to suit our purpose.’
However, technologies that expand the carrying capacity of our planet (or open up the universe to our colonization) take time to develop. The convolved exponentials of our population growth and our per capita demand for energy have outpaced our ability to expand the carrying capacity of the planet (in this moment). Perhaps a mismatch in our rates of growth and the rates at which we can expand the carrying capacity is at the heart of this explanation for the grand challenge of our time.
A World Without Growth
Do the very things that enable techno-optimism (invention, progress, etc.) require growth?
If the challenge of finite resources is truly a challenge of growth outpacing carrying capacity expansion, then there are two solutions: increase the rate of carrying capacity expansion or reduce the rate of growth.
It turns out that we might encounter the latter condition organically. The rate of population increase is slowing. The combined trends of increasing quality of life (which results in people choosing to have fewer children), reduced child mortality (which allows people to have fewer children while still providing a minimum number of surviving offspring), and increasing women’s education and women’s rights all are pointing towards a global society that may find population equilibrium. Our best guess is that population peaks at around 11.2 billion.
Source: UN World Population Prospects, 2019
Our collective demand for goods and services scales with population, so what happens to global economic growth in a world of a declining population?
Well, it turns out that very few of us don’t normalize to quality of life (we are sooooo adaptable), and we’ve yet to hit the ceiling of demand growth even in the wealthiest countries. We can use GDP as a modestly appropriate heuristic for thinking about demand.
GDP = GDP per Capita X Population
GDP per capita has continued to grow, and even outpaces population growth in much of the world. Where this is true, it’s possible for economic growth to exist even in a world without population growth.
Source: Our World in Data
Much of our present economic and social framework is based on a presumption of growth (in both population and, more critically, GDP*A thorough body of work explores whether GDP is the right metric for judging society. ‘Wellness’ and ‘Quality of Life’ are concepts more dear to many of our hearts – the challenge is in measurement!). The notion that there is a time-value to money, the belief in markets, and even the foundational belief in ‘human progress’ is often conflated with a presumption of growth. Indeed, many of the very things that are required to expand the carrying capacity of the planet (including invention and innovation) are often posited to require growth.
The absence of growth is feared to have consequences that are incompatible with our cultural values including the failure of the fabric of communities, a skyrocketing dependency ratio (i.e. more old people than young people), and insufficient job creation.
What economic framework, what organizing principles for society, can enable a transition to a reduced or zero-growth state without harm to qualities of life (and to the extent that this quality of life depends on it, productivity), now and in the future? This, surely, is a grand challenge.
It’s not hard to connect the dots between a society that doesn’t know how to function without growth and our present issue around climate. It’s growth up to and past the carrying capacity that puts us at risk. The sources of demand most centrally relevant to our climate (mostly mediated through greenhouse gas emissions) include demand for energy, demand for food, demand for space, demand for things, and demand for infrastructure.
Some of these sources of demand saturate to some degree as a function of affluence and population stability. For example, there is only so much food that one person can consume (even if it’s the most rich and GHG/land/water/labor intensive food conceivable). The chart below shows the daily calories supplied per person vs. GDP per capita by country and shows a tendency to asymptote.
Source: Our World in Data
The emissions intensity of diets trend higher with affluence. However, the larger determinant, as shown below, is the fraction of the diet associated with animal protein and the relative emissions intensity of animal protein production in a given economy.
GHG per capita of diets by country. Source: Kim et al. 2020
Similarly, infrastructure (think concrete and steel) demand saturates as a function of population and societal development.
Source: van Ruijven et al. 2016
Our demand for space (think deforestation) is more a function our demand for agriculture than for living space (even under pretty generous assumptions of, say, 250 W m-2 of solar fluence converted at 0.5% photosynthetic efficiency to food and 100% of that food being unwasted with all of us eating at the bottom of the food chain, the average American would need 100 m2 of land for food and the living space per person even in our spread-out-country averages less than that!). Consequently, as our demand for food saturates, so will our demand for land. There are some limits, of course, depending on how high up the food chain we eat (i.e. how many calories go into producing one calorie that we consume),*Today, we already use ~50% of land mass for agriculture but perhaps we can hope that we will avoid creating new species to eat our existing food-generating species and suffer the additional round of metabolic inefficiency associated therein.
Further, because of innovation in agricultural production, our crop productivity has increased dramatically (meaning we make more food per acre of land we farm).
Source: Our World in Data
That leaves ‘things’ and energy. Very few ‘things’ that we use have GHG emissions associated with them outside of the energy that goes into making them. Some exceptions include cement (which has process emissions associated with the thermal decomposition of calcium carbonate), fertilizer (which has nitrous oxide emissions associated with its use), air conditioning (and the HFCs that come with it), and all of the organic waste that we produce that has the potential to turn into methane emissions in the landfill. Thus, our limits to growth for ‘things’ have much more to do with resource limits (i.e. atoms), and there are a LOT of atoms. Increasingly, our ‘things’ are digital in nature and thus are further directly tied to an energy footprint rather than an ‘atomic’ footprint*To be clear, the emissions associated with these sectors already exceed what our planet can sustain, so we’re not off the hook for them. But their growth potential is what is at question in this section, not their present contribution to GHGs..
So that leaves energy. Ahhh, energy. You might recall that doing something is harder than doing nothing – that’s because it takes energy. So, no matter what we want to do, we’ll need energy to do it. Whether we should want to do more and more is a question that we won’t address here, but we can look at our historic trends of energy use to understand what our energy demand may look like in the future.
Our demand for energy has historically proven exponential:
Source: Our World in Data
However, as you might recall, our population has also been growing exponentially. Our demand for energy can be calculated as:
Energy Demand per Capita X World Population
Source: Our World in Data
Our per capita demand for energy has been flattening, especially in the developing world. However, this asymptoting trend may be deceptive: in the history of our species we have gone through several phases of unlocking new energy sources, and of unlocking new demand for sources of energy, and consequently it is premature to predict that we have saturated our taste for energy. Indeed, if we look to the relationship between GDP per capita and energy demand we see that individuals in wealthier countries tend to use more energy:
Source: Our World in Data
Further, as we electrify the world, our demand for electricity per capita continues to grow supralinearly with population:
Source: Our World in Data
Energy lets us do everything that we do, starting with living (the energy in our food). We are fundamentally dissipative systems (see Prigogine) – non-equilibrium entities that depend on the flux of energy to survive, to propagate, and to continue to interact with the universe. The good news is, the use of energy isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the environment; it doesn’t necessarily have negative externalities other than increasing entropy and reducing the overall free energy of the universe (which just might be the point of it all anyway).
Fossil fuels dominate our present sources of energy, and it is in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (and some other pollution) that we find ourselves bumping up against a carrying capacity limit associated with our use of energy. But even if we switch to renewable sources, how extensible is our demand for energy before we reach the next limit?
The principal fluxes of energy on our planet come from 1) the sun, 2) geothermal energy (which was gravitational potential energy translated into thermal energy when our planet formed), and 3) nuclear energy (via the decay of unstable isotopes in our planet). Our planet experiences an average of approximately 250 W m-2 of solar fluence, for approximately 1.1 * 1018 kWh per year of total energy received from the sun. At a population of 11.2 billion, even if we were, with 100% efficiency, to capture all solar energy and convert it into usable energy, we could only each have an allowance of just under 100 million kWh yr-1. Now that might seem like a lot of energy (even Iceland and Qatar only use an average of ~200,000 kWh per person per year). A whole lot more than we could conceive of needing. However, if history has taught us anything about ourselves, it is that we continue to innovate new ways of shaping the world to suit our whim, new ways of reaching out to explore the universe and to propagate into it, and we consequently demand evermore energy (and evermore energy density) to achieve these ends.
Is it possible that we find ourselves tapping out at some maximum energy demand? Absolutely, and it would be a monumental cultural shift – it would imply either 1) and end to growth-orientation (in the context of needing more and more things, services, etc. etc.) or 2) a digitization of our lives. If we follow our present trends of increasing energy demand per capita, then we might expect energy demand to exceed the supply of solar energy. The nuclear potential energy of our planet, however, should be sufficient to keep us occupied for some time (the energy embodied in the oceans should we fuse every atom of hydrogen together in a chain emulating what occurs in the sun would be sufficient to sustain ~4.7 trillion kWh yr-1 per person for 11.2 billion people for a million years – see Per Capita Energy Supply). It will mean incredible things for whatever our species evolves into should we find this limiting!
The reason I started working in energy was that a world with infinite, effectively-free energy is a world of infinite possibility. We can always erase the entropic harm we do in our tiny enclave of this vast universe by using energy to ‘pump’ entropy elsewhere (even climate change!). So many of our problems could be resolved if we had access to such a source of energy.
However, as I have experienced what it means to live as a human being, as a part of modern society and culture, I have been forced to acknowledge that energy is indeed enabling, but what it enables is yet more crucial. How we use the energy we have may or may not serve us. On the whole, I’d like to believe that we’ve used energy to create wellness and quality of life. But once survival of ourselves, our families, our communities, and our species is reasonably secure, perhaps opportunity for a new framework for choosing how to deploy energy is merited. How might our use of energy best serve us going forward?
Why have I turned a discussion about growth into a discussion about energy? Because energy is the critical enabler of all growth. However, it is worth noting that the energy intensity of GDP has been declining as society increasingly demands services and labor moves up the value ladder. This might imply that economic growth may not require growth in energy consumption, nor growth in population.
Source: Our World in Data
So whether you believe we’ll self-limit (either proactively or reactively) or if our hunger for ‘things’ and energy will grow evermore, the nature of our growth will change in the coming decades. Navigating our way through this, in analogy to the discussion on our use of energy, means confronting that we organize ourselves, our societies, and our economies according to a paradigm that has served us to getting to this incredible point. But it just might be time for a new paradigm, and one that considers the value of growth in a new light.
Evolving Our Values
If the ‘age of growth’ is coming to a close, what will fill the vacuum created by our prime metric (GDP) ceasing to be the principal means by which we measure our progress? Finding a way of measuring, and ‘valuing’, what we value (and creating the boundary conditions for society that enable these values to propagate) is surely a candidate for our grand challenge.
I am far from the first to voice the idea that perhaps it is time to revisit the metrics that we use to measure our society. One might argue that our present climate challenge stems from a failure to negatively value the externalities on our environment, which in turn is evidence of a failure to value what is indeed valuable in the natural world (even if only from the lens of valuable to people). The sets of policies and regulations embodied by governments serve as proxy for our collective values, and the boundary conditions policies impose on markets serve to enable them to align with these values. We should be unsurprised by a system that has been selected (naturally and synthetically) for efficiency fulfilling its obligate mandate to the greatest extent possible – it’s our role to ensure that this mandate aligns with our needs, present and future.
It is high time to have a public discussion of the values by which we wish to organize society, and to ‘internalize’ these values in our policy and in our markets.
Expanding ‘I’
Valuing Ourselves, Society, and the Future
Another interpretation of ‘climate change as a symptom’ relates to our relative valuation of ourselves, the collective species, and the future.
Let’s look at the concept of an ‘externality’ – an impact on a system external to the source of agency. Climate change is described as a negative externality because the emissions that one member of society is responsible for may incur costs to other individuals. The locus of agency is the individual in this definition.
Climate is also an externality in the context of a broader definition of the source of agency. The society of the present (comprising individuals alive today) is choosing to continue to produce emissions that will incur costs to the society of the future (at least in part comprising individuals that are not alive today).
Perhaps our grand challenge is in the definition of what comprises ‘external’ – of the level of collective that we consider having agency.
At the present, we define the unit of agency as a single human. It’s obvious why – this is the level at which we directly feel a sense of ‘I’ and a sense of agency. However ‘I’ contains a whole lot of sub-entities (the 3 * 1013 cells in our body, the 4 * 1013 bacteria, etc.). We don’t hold our cells accountable for our actions, despite the fact that we are an emergent property of the pattern of interaction of these entities (other than the occasional neurological diagnosis where we blame a part of the brain for our abnormal behavior). But is the the primary experience of our existence any less arbitrary of a level at which to define ‘agency’ than others? Is a physician that fouls up a brain surgery because she hasn’t slept in 24 hours to blame, or is the hospital and the shift policy to blame? Or is the competitive nature of healthcare that requires hospitals to seek efficiencies in surgeon deployment in this country to blame? The answer is less clear.
What is more alive – an ant, or an ant colony? Ants have some modicum of processing power, and they each can be seen to be acting as independent agents. But ant colonies exhibit fantastically complex behavior that exceeds the complexity that can be modeled by an individual citizen of the colony. If we zoom out, sometimes it is easier to view the behavior of an ant colony as evidently comprising of agency than that of a single ant.
We are eminently more complex than an individual ant (and perhaps our own brains have sufficient modeling power to emulate a universal machine), but perhaps our society is, like ant colonies, a superspecies organism that exhibits yet higher complexity and deserves its own sense of agency.
One of the most famous studies in the history of social science is the ‘marshmallow test.’ It goes something like this:
The subject (typically a child) is told ‘you can have one marshmallow now, or you can have two marshmallows in 15 minutes.’ The first marshmallow is left in front of the subject during the 15 minute test period.
This test of delayed gratification supposedly correlates remarkably to various metrics of success and achievement later in life. It requires a theory of mind for oneself, a sufficient sense that one’s future self will have a preference for marshmallows not entirely dissimilar from one’s present self, and a sufficient valuation of said future self relative to said present self. Notable of the test is that there are no externalities – the only person affected is oneself (we’ll avoid the philosophical morass of discussing whether future selves and present selves are the same self).
If we’re held responsible as individuals, the analogy of the marshmallow test for climate would go something like:
The subject is told ‘you can have one marshmallow now, or you and another person who you’ve never met can have one marshmallow in 50 years.’ The first marshmallow is left in front of the subject during the 50 year test period.
Turns out, not as many folks are willing to wait under these conditions. The outcomes improve slightly if we make the situation a bit more personal:
The subject is told ‘you can have one marshmallow now, or you and your future child can have one marshmallow in 50 years.’ The first marshmallow is left in front of the subject during the 50 year test period.
Yet, still we don’t seem to be making the choice to wait for the second marshmallow.
But what if the level at which we took responsibility, and measured utility, wasn’t at the individual level, but at the societal level? Then the analogy would be:
The subject (a species) is told ‘you can have one marshmallow now, or you can have two marshmallows in 50 years.’ The first marshmallow is left in front of the subject during the 50 year test period.
Forgive the absurd analogies. The point is – perhaps our grand challenge is to evolve into a species-level superorganism that takes responsibility, and defines agency, at the species level. Then maybe, just maybe, we could all be the kid that waits for two marshmallows.
Coping with Acceleration
The times, they are a changin’.
Not just that, the rate of change is changing – we’re experiencing acceleration on all sorts of axes relevant for how we live our lives. Exponentials abound. The technology and culture of our present day is almost alien to our parents. How alien will the world in 50 years be to us?
Put succinctly, could the grand challenge of this time be in finding the anchors of our values that can be carried across generations when the rate of change is so high?
What might such cultural values entail and why are they existentially relevant?
At their core, cultural values should find themselves selected for in service of our needs. Culture is subject to the logic of natural selection, but what comprises selection pressure may be more subtle.*Culture can be seen as an emergent property – our agency in determining the dominant culture is a question for the anthropologists and sociologists. Natural selection operates on a basis of selection for propagation – how might we institute selection pressures that transcend ‘survival’ and ‘reproduction?’ Culture can change within the lifetime of a single individual, the ‘software’ running on our collective ‘hardware.’ Is it not possible that what serves survival (or thriving) in one era may not ultimately serve in another (e.g. the unbridled use of fossil fuels)?
It begs the question of whether there are indeed values that we might hold constant across generations, through all future evolution of our species in both ‘software’ and ‘hardware.’ Or, perhaps, we should hold ourselves to the standard of continuing to improve upon and refine our values to serve us in each moment, and each future moment, optimally based on our collective concurrent wisdom. Process instead of product. We should then seek to establish a self-propagating pattern of intentional value-refinement that will enable us to identify with the future ‘humanity.’ We would thus be defined as a species by the intention and process of seeking the good, striving for the better, and hoping for the best. Let’s hope that our student 500 years from now can be so generous as to see that in us.
Digital Life
Speaking of exponentials and the acceleration of change… we find ourselves amidst the great digitization of life. Information is king, the rate and frequency of communication is accelerating. As we merge with our technology, we increasingly live our lives digitally, virtually. In this trend is there perhaps an element of detachment from our physical constraints?
The digitization of our lives has (and will have increasingly) changed the way that we relate to each other and to the physical world. The conflicting trends of evermore agency to determine the slice of humanity with whom one interacts in what capacity (without consideration of the boundaries of geography or language) and the increasing influence over our perceived agency by the systems that collect information and manage our digital lives affects our culture, our values, and even our vocabulary.
If we go so far as to imagine merging with our technology yet further, the question of when we will have determined ourselves to have evolved into a post-human raises its head. How will we manage these rapid transitions? How should we incorporate technology into our lives? Do we change the way that we value future people? Does digitization enable new ways to organize society? A grand challenge indeed.*Perhaps the even more pressing ‘digital’ issue is that of artificial general intelligence and whether we will ultimately give rise to a phenomena that displaces us, but I’ll leave that topic alone for now
It could be argued that digitization reduces our dependence on the health of the planet. We will still need to eat and have access to water (until we fully digitize consciousness… I’ll leave those discussions for the futurists of Silicon Valley), but perhaps we could envision surviving climate disaster by increasingly dissociating our society and culture from the physical world. Whether this trend will serve to reduce the burden we place on the ecosystems in which we participate (and thus be part of the solution to climate change), or will serve as an adaptation to a reduction in ecosystem capacity (i.e. we wrecked the planet but now define our quality of life in the context of a digital existence), if sufficient time is granted our species without collapse (internally- or externally-mediated) our student of the future will likely be unable to empathize with our current (relatively) analog culture.
Polarization vs. Homogeneity
Does growth create or require polarization? Does emergence require specialization? Do we still need either?
We live in a time of perceived polarization – of wealth, of politics, and of visions for our collective future. At its core, our question of whether we should drive towards a society with less polarization is a question of values. However, regardless of how our collective values have evolved over the prior centuries, a paradigm shift is merited in light of the dramatic leap into the anthropocene that we have made in the past decades.
Prior to exceeding the carrying capacity of our planet, we had not been operating within a zero-sum framework. Wealth, quality of life, freedom – these aren’t conserved quantities. Consequently, and thankfully, absolute standard of living has increased for the vast majority of humanity, and this is (to some degree) reflected in average GDP per capita over time.
Source: World Bank
But the average GDP per capita doesn’t tell the whole story. The Gini Coefficient is a metric quantifying income inequality. Most of the world is experiencing a reduction in income inequality. However, certain countries (like the U.S.) are experiencing growing inequality.
Source: Our World in Data
In the U.S., the rate of increase of wealth appears supralinear in relation to present wealth, meaning that the richest of our society are growing richer faster than the poorest of our society.
Source: Piketty et al.
What matters more – absolute or relative wealth? There are certain elements of quality of life that rely on absolute wealth, and certain elements that depend on relative wealth.
As a proxy for some of the more ‘absolute’ quality of life metrics, we can look at the accessibility of food.
Source: Our World in Data
Or perhaps we can look at the amount of life accessible over time:
Source: Our World in Data
There are clear exceptions to the rule, but (generally speaking) quality of life has been improving for the worst and the best off among us.
What about those elements of quality of life that are ‘relative?’ We can track the polarization of wealth over time (see Gini Coefficient above). The global variance in the distribution of wealth has been decreasing over time.
Source: Our World in Data
Tax policy (and other means of redistribution) is also important in determining the relative distribution of wealth:
Source: Our World in Data
Much of our perception of our wealth is relative – the old “keeping up with the Joneses”. This is a consequence of both cultural norms and capitalistic policies. Consequently, much of our perceived quality of life is a consequence of not just our absolute wealth, but on the share of the total pie that we find ourselves receiving.
It is important to distinguish between polarization of quality of life and polarization of generated and captured wealth. This is another reason for why measuring what we value matters so much – we’re focusing so much on polarization of wealth in this discussion because we measure it!
The relationship between economic inequality and our climate challenges is complex. However, interesting features emerge if we plot the per capita GHG emissions vs. Gini Coefficient by country:
Source: Hubler 2016
For wealthy nations, if one squints one might divine a positive correlation between our per capita emissions and our level of economic inequality.
What values and beliefs are reflected in organizing principles that enable vs. mitigate polarization?
Arguments in favor of policies that enable polarization include that innovation and ‘total pie’ growth are best served by allowing for competition, and that extreme outcomes incentivize invention, entrepreneurship, and achievement. Another line of reasoning might be that specialization (which inherently implies a lack of homogeneity) is critical for overall economic efficiency. More aesthetic arguments might indicate that homogeneity itself is not a value to strive for, and that individuality is a principal virtue by which to organize a system of government.
Freedom, autonomy, agency, individuality – do these require polarization? Growth, innovation, creation – do these require polarization? How about adaptation in a world of finite resources, a world with reduced growth, a world where more and more elements of quality of life are digitized and relative wealth is increasingly synthetically constructed? What might enable us to evolve into a superspecies?*There is a biological analogy to draw. What relative level of ‘wellbeing’ of cells makes for a healthy whole organism? Is there a tradeoff between subjugation and overall adaptability / survivability? In a survival paradigm, fitness is a key selector. However, might we not have the luxury of choosing a different paradigm because we have sufficient collective abundance that we aren’t fighting for survival? Perhaps this is our grand challenge – to pull ourselves back from the billion-year survival-driven journey and to enable a new framework for selection. Our own, informed by reason, and compassion, and self-awareness.
We are presently running a grand experiment. Much of the world is actively reducing polarization (of wealth at least, and we might presume that other axes of polarization should follow or at least be correlated with the same policies). However, a few countries (of which the U.S. is one) are on precisely the opposite path. What are the consequences of polarization? How does it affect growth, competitiveness? How will that change in a world that is increasingly zero-sum due to our collective exceeding of carrying capacity? These are questions that will be explored in the coming century. How we choose to value equality and specialization – this is a grand challenge.
Conclusion
Climate may only be a symptom of the grand challenge of our time, but it might prove that working to solve this canary in the coal mine will be the practice through which we address the underlying challenge. This is an opportunity for emergence, for evolution, because it will require us as a species to act together, as one. It will require intentionality around the values we hold and a willingness to revisit them to define what humanity really is.
Or maybe we will find ourselves seeking divorce from the physical world; perhaps in the face of an evolving climate we will commit to digitization, to evolving our very definition of the ‘reality’ within which we live.
I don’t know the answer to the question of ‘what is the grand challenge of our time?’ And, perhaps, we can’t yet know because it will depend on the path our future takes. However, struggling to find a solution to climate change might be the crucible for our species to find its way through both the question and the answer to it.
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Sender, R., Fuchs, S., & Milo, R. (2016). Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body. PLOS Biology, 14(8), e1002533. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002533
Smil, V. (2017). Energy and Civilization: A History. The MIT Press.
Prigogine, I., Stengers, I., & Toffler, A. (2018). Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (Reprint edition). Verso.
van Ruijven, B., Vuuren, D., Boskaljon, W., Neelis, M., Saygin, D., & Patel, M. (2016). Long-term model-based projections of energy use and CO2 emissions from the global steel and cement industries. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 112, 15–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2016.04.016
Kim, B. F., Santo, R. E., Scatterday, A. P., Fry, J. P., Synk, C. M., Cebron, S. R., Mekonnen, M. M., Hoekstra, A. Y., de Pee, S., Bloem, M. W., Neff, R. A., & Nachman, K. E. (2020). Country-specific dietary shifts to mitigate climate and water crises. Global Environmental Change, 62, 101926. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2019.05.010
